Walking to stay home: fighting for DREAMers and beyond with Maria Duarte and Omar Cisneros

March 5th was the deadline set by the Trump administration for the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program protecting young immigrants. The deadline came and went without Congress acting, and around the country migrants and their allies held demonstrations demanding legislators take up the issue. I spoke with two young organizers from the Seed Project of Movimiento Cosecha.

MD: There’s lots of uncertainty everywhere, so we still took action on Monday because we thought it was very important to still show that although we can continue to renew those permits, we’re still in crisis, there’s still a lot of people who would have qualified for DACA and now can’t, there’s still so many young folks who didn’t qualify for DACA and need a clean DREAM Act. We decided to target Democrats specifically because time and time again we’ve seen that Democrats have the ability to help us, they have the power to help us. The government shutdown–that could have been prolonged, they could have had the results. And they chose not to help us. In 2010 we needed five more votes from Democrats to pass the DREAM Act. It didn’t happen. It’s become like a cycle of Democrats promising us something and continuing to just downplay our experience and our struggle as they continue to contribute to the attacks on our communities. The Obama administration deported three million people. Honestly as an undocumented person, I feel betrayed by the Democratic party and feel that they are only using us as a political gambling toy and it was time that we called them out on that and so we took action yesterday at the DNC and told them that our community will stop voting for them, our allies will stop voting for them if they don’t take action that’s actually tangible.

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